I've been asked a number of times, "Why do you want to be a Producer?"

The answer is simple. I love making games. L-O-V-E. I've been a game geek my entire life, and working as a producer lets me take part in the entire creative process while helping everybody else on the team do what they do best.

I have been extremely fortunate in my career so far, and have been granted the opportunity to make some terrific games for young audiences. Building these games created some terrific challenges, such as how to make them accessible to the youngest players while making sure they are still engaging and challenging for older children. These exercises gave me the opportunity to put my design capabilities to the test while managing and working with wonderful teams of creative individuals to deliver the titles under tight deadlines.

As a producer, I get to serve as a leader, a facilitator, a designer, a tester and a director all at once. I get to work on exciting projects with talented, passionate creative people and bring out the best in them while creating games we love. I could not ask for a better role!

Screenshot of the Unity Engine with my game Bad Manor.

During my time at DigiPen Institute of Technology, I was fortunate to get to work on four different game projects. The last two, Bad Manor and Salvage Youth, I served as Producer, building and leading the team, managing our scope, schedule and pipeline and working directly with the artists, programmers and designers to make sure we're all building the best game we possibly can.

Most of my responsibilities as a producer tend to revolve around project management - keeping track of scope, managing task lists, working with the designers to keep the focus on fun, working with the artists to keep the pipeline moving and working with the programmers to make sure everyone has the tools they need. I schedule meetings, I communicate with the administration to keep them up to date on the progress of the game, I facilitate work sessions and communication between the teams to prevent production blocks and keep things moving.

My last two student games were built in the Unity game engine, and a large part of my responsibility for those projects was spent researching and implementing new tech, such as Allegorythmic's Substance Designer, a software package for creating dynamic procedural textures, and PixelPlacement's iTween for Unity, a plugin that allows us to animate and move objects along spline curves within the game world, dramatically speeding up our production process.

Compilation of different tools used in our production site.

My favorite part of working as a Producer, though, is building and maintaining the team. For Salvage Youth, was in charge of a team of six artists, two designers and two programmers with additional work "contracted" out to other students on a part-time basis. Managing a team this size certainly has its challenges but by working with them to find the communication tools that work best for them I developed a website workspace with constantly updated task lists, a wiki system for game documentation and a blog used by the entire team to share progress on art, design, feature development progress and all sorts of other useful links and galleries for inspiration. Through this site we were able to keep the entire team updated on the status of each asset and feature as it moves through the pipeline and help each other out whenever we hit a block.

An early level layout concept for Salvage Youth by environment artist Alexi Gil.

For Salvage Youth we spent the three months over summer in pre-production, planning and revising our game design, developing our visual style and workflow and fleshing out the game world we wanted to create. Once we had the core design figured out we got the entire team together for one huge waterfall projection planning session, outlining every potential task we could think of that the project would entail and estimating how long they would take. This gave us our initial scope and let us know that yes, we could make this game.

Once we moved into full production mode at the beginning of the Fall Semester we shifted more towards an agile method of planning our tasks, keeping the overall schedule and scope in mind but iterating on the work that needed attention and allowing playtesting to guide our design decisions and polishing the mechanics and assets as time and schedule allowed. Working in this way has given us the best of both worlds - we started knowing we weren't biting off more then we could chew but we had the freedom to focus on quality and be more flexible with our day-to-day work, rather then staying on a rigid, potentially broken plan.

A big ol' dungeon model I built out of styrofoam, wood and all kinds of other stuff.

Even outside of big projects like the games above, I'm usually working on some sort of game. Whether it's rewriting the rules for D&D to accommodate shifting players and busy schedules or drawing maps of imaginary worlds or creating house rules for board games to keep gameplay fresh, I'm happiest when I'm making games to share with friends.

I make games because I love games. I'm a disciple of the power of play, of the interaction of player and creator that is unique to the medium. As a producer I can be an advocate for my passion while helping other creators who share my drive to build worlds, experiences and distractions. I can work with like-minded people to create the toys I always wanted.